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Entertainment doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. A park, a wildlife refuge, a public library, a lake or river access point, a clear night sky, these are already available to most people, and they’re often a better use of an afternoon than the costly alternatives we default to without thinking about it. Start with the public library. There are more than 17,000 public library outlets across the country, and a library card gets you books, movies, music, research databases, a

October is a good time to check your Flexible Spending Account balance. The plan year is closing in on its deadline for most people, and open enrollment for next year’s benefits is starting at many employers in the next few weeks. The Use-It-or-Lose-It Rule Healthcare FSA funds that go unused by the end of the plan year are forfeited by default. That’s the rule the account runs on unless your employer has built in one of two specific exceptions, a grace period of up to an ext

A lot of people who start saving for retirement in their 40s or 50s carry around a quiet worry that they’ve already missed their window. That worry is understandable, but it isn’t entirely accurate. Starting later changes the math and the approach, not whether a solid retirement is still possible. Why the Math Changes The real difference is time. Someone who starts investing at 25 gets roughly four decades of compounding working in their favor before a typical retirement age.

Most people either have no life insurance or a policy they picked years ago without checking whether it still matches their life. Both leave real gaps for the people who depend on you. The simplest approach, multiplying your income by 10, is a quick starting point, but it’s also too simple to rely on by itself. It skips debt, your mortgage balance, and future costs like your kids’ education, so it tends to miss the real number in either direction. A more complete approach is

Most couples don't fight about money because one of them is bad with it. They fight because they're each running their own financial plan in their head, built from a different childhood, a different set of fears, and a different definition of what "enough" means, and neither plan was ever written down or agreed to out loud. That mismatch is where the real tension lives. One partner tracks every dollar and feels unsafe when spending feels loose. The other sees money as somethi

My third book is live today, Waiter, There's an Elephant on My Plate: How to Do Big Things One Bite at a Time. It's available now on Amazon in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited. For years, people have asked me some version of the same question. How do you do it all? I teach college courses, I write, I'm finishing a doctoral program, I run a financial planning practice, and I still make time for the people in my life. For a long time my answer was va

Money is hectic in a way that is so common in our lives that we generally just accept it. There's your normal income, and maybe a side gig or some other source of income that isn't steady from month to month. There are the regular expenses that show up like clockwork, utilities, groceries, insurance, and a dozen smaller ones behind those. There are the irregular expenses that are harder to plan around, a car repair, a medical bill, a gift for someone you love. There are the c

A few weeks ago I wrote about money identity, the sense of self a person builds around money over a lifetime, often shaped by hardship. Most of what gets written about it, including that post, leans toward where it causes trouble, an identity built around scarcity that makes it hard to spend even once someone can genuinely afford to. That's real, but it's only half the picture. The same identity that gets in the way in one moment is often exactly what's carrying someone forwa

Financial planning typically involves a lot of time spent on the numbers, the allocation, the tax strategy, the insurance coverage, the retirement projections. Less time usually goes to the question underneath all of that, why a person relates to money the way they do in the first place. Two concepts get used to describe that underlying relationship, money scripts and money identity, and they are not the same thing. What Money Scripts Are Money scripts is a term from financia

As a CFP® professional and a licensed Illinois Life Producer, my work covers the full range of a household's financial life, investments, retirement, taxes, estate planning, and life insurance coverage, which are the typical and expected services, but I also cover budgeting, financial counseling, cash flow and debt reduction, and credit review. Investments Investment management is the piece most people think of first when they hear financial planning, but it is one piece amon

Diesel crossed $6 a gallon average nationally for the first time ever on September 10, and regular gas has climbed right alongside it, sitting around $4.29 a gallon average, up about 40% from roughly $3.06 back in January. Gas is the part everyone sees on a sign by the road, but it's not the only place this shows up. Annual inflation is still running around 3.4%, and that's stretched across groceries, insurance, utilities, and just about everything else a household buys regul

Financial counselor and financial therapist get used interchangeably a lot, but they're two different services built to solve two different problems. Getting the wrong one, or not knowing the other exists, can mean months of frustration with a solution that was never going to fix what's actually going on. What financial counseling does Financial counseling is built around the practical skills side of money, budgeting, debt payoff, credit repair, and foundational goals like sa

What do you do when you never had anyone in your life showing you what financial success looks like? Not a lecture, an actual lived example, a parent or relative who built something and could show you how it's done. For a lot of people, that person never existed growing up, and some are still looking around them now and not finding one. That's not a personal failing, it's a structural gap in what's been available to model. Why We Look to Models From a Distance People don't ju

A credit score isn't one measurement, it's a weighted combination of several different factors, each contributing different weight to the final number. Understanding what each factor covers, and just as importantly, what it doesn't cover, makes it much easier to know where to focus. Payment History Carries The Most Weight Payment history makes up nearly 35 percent of a FICO score, more than any other single factor. It tracks whether payments on credit cards, loans, and other

I don't usually comment on popular culture or the news of the day, but I'm making an exception for Dolly Parton. She passed away yesterday at 80, and her life deserves a moment of recognition here, not because she was famous, but because of how she used that fame. A Humble Beginning Parton was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, one of twelve children in a family with very little money. Her father worked the land to get by, and details

Opportunity cost is simply the value of what you give up when you choose one option over another. Every decision, big or small, means picking one path and setting the others aside. The concept gets taught early in any economics or finance class because it applies everywhere resources are limited, and money, time, and energy are all limited resources. Understanding it doesn't mean overanalyzing every choice, it means recognizing that a choice always has two sides, the thing yo

Someone building a side income twenty years ago needed a business plan, a sizeable chunk of startup capital, and probably a lease on a storefront or a wholesale account with a manufacturer. Someone doing it today can build a simple, low-cost website in an afternoon without writing a single line of code, generate product copy and design work through free AI tools that used to run hundreds of dollars an hour, and put that work in front of exactly the right audience for a few do

On July 15 of this year I passed the CFP® exam. The exam is one requirement among several, and the one that remained after it was the experience requirement. It's the piece that takes years to accumulate rather than a single test date to prepare for. As of today, that requirement is complete, and I have met every standard the CFP Board sets to use the CFP® marks. I have spent a lot of time writing about financial identity, about the stories people tell themselves regarding mo

There was a period in my life where I wasn't just budgeting my household money, I was performing something closer to strict cash accounting. The budget existed, and my wife and I knew exactly what our discretionary and non-discretionary spending looked like. That knowledge didn't stop me from entering every single receipt, checking every transaction daily, and running what amounted to a mental chess match with every dollar that moved through our accounts. What Too Close Looke